6th
Irrigating the Desert of the Real
My last real post got me thinking about locality and how we find information. I spend a lot of time in libraries, especially the underground library here at UIUC, which has neat-o robotic bookshelves and lots of hidden corners where I can actually get some work done.
Libraries are interesting places. The books of a library are structured differently from the data of the net. This can be quite refreshing. I like to walk down an aisle and try to estimate the gigabytes per stride. After n stacks, the subject matter drifts by a peculiar function of n which is related to the density of human knowledge in that subject but is also unique to each library. Online, you’ve got the regular news, blogs, feeds, social networks, etc. It almost seems that connectedness beyond some critical level tends to entrench, rather than disperse. It removes room for the intuitive leaps you can get from physical juxtaposition.
What would be cool about objects having (or seeming to have) a memory of their own is it would add that kind of “arbitrary” topology to browsable information. You could either follow the data to the place that’s connected to it, or browse physical space and be sometimes surprised by the connections in the data. You could even think of crude, physical stuff as just a semantic network for the data of the internet (I think Baudrillard would really dig that).
Rudy Rucker wrote about the limits of VR in a recent blog post (by the way, his book Postsingular is great, give it a read). He makes some good points, and I agree at least on a technical level that it’s a bad idea to take Earth apart to use for raw computing resources (but hey, any other planet is fair game). For one, there’s no overwhelming reason to do so, but also I think it might make good Information Architecture sense to have Earth around. It has its own kind of computation, as Rucker points out, and it’s different than our networks and programs. A little meta-diversity might go a long way.
Well, if I ever get this Net-SLAM stuff going, that would be a good first app. You wouldn’t need an HMD, a camera-phone would suffice… pointing it at your surroundings, it would match feature points with a database and let you tag and upload content to any visible object(s), as well as being a browser for the data other people have left. And hey, furniture wants to blog, too.
